Miscellanea Agnostica

Richard Dawkins is once again taking on the forces of religionism. This time, he’s explaining what evolution is and isn’t, and how creationists and their close allies “intelligent designers” misinform their sheep about it. His new book is called The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. Excerpts have been published in several venues; here is one published in Newsweek:

The Angry Evolutionist

Creationists are deeply enamored of the fossil record, because they have been taught (by each other) to repeat, over and over, the mantra that it is full of “gaps”: “Show me your ‘intermediates!’” They fondly (very fondly) imagine that these “gaps” are an embarrassment to evolutionists. Actually, we are lucky to have any fossils at all, let alone the massive numbers that we now do have to document evolutionary history—large numbers of which, by any standards, constitute beautiful “intermediates.” We don’t need fossils in order to demonstrate that evolution is a fact. The evidence for evolution would be entirely secure even if not a single corpse had ever fossilized. It is a bonus that we do actually have rich seams of fossils to mine, and more are discovered every day. The fossil evidence for evolution in many major animal groups is wonderfully strong. Nevertheless there are, of course, gaps, and creationists love them obsessively.

Essentially Dawkins goes on to explain that the “gaps in the fossil record” that Creationists wail about so often, do not actually refute evolution. Fossils — any fossils at all — are merely “frosting on the cake,” and even if there were none at all, evolution would still be borne out by the evidence. Dawkins goes on to explain what might weigh against it:

What would be evidence against evolution, and very strong evidence at that, would be the discovery of even a single fossil in the wrong geological stratum. As J.B.S. Haldane famously retorted when asked to name an observation that would disprove the theory of evolution, “Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian!” No such rabbits, no authentically anachronistic fossils of any kind, have ever been found. All the fossils that we have, and there are very very many indeed, occur, without a single authenticated exception, in the right temporal sequence. Yes, there are gaps where there are no fossils at all, and that is only to be expected. But not a single solitary fossil has ever been found before it could have evolved. That is a very telling fact. A good theory is one that is vulnerable to disproof, yet is not disproved. Evolution could so easily be disproved if just a single fossil turned up in the wrong date order. Evolution has passed this test with flying colors. Skeptics of evolution who wish to prove their case should be diligently scrabbling around in the rocks, desperately trying to find anachronistic fossils.

Dawkins also addresses the fallacy of looking for “transitional forms,” as well as Creationists’ other unreasonable expectations of evolution, which is that it cannot be true, since monkeys do not give birth to homo sapiens:

The silliest of all these “missing link” challenges are the following two (or variants of them, of which there are many). First, “If people came from monkeys via frogs and fish, then why does the fossil record not contain a ‘fronkey’?” And, second, “I’ll believe in evolution when I see a monkey give birth to a human baby.” This last one makes the same mistake as all the others, plus the additional one of thinking that major evolutionary change happens overnight.

Well, of course, monkeys are not descended from frogs. No sane evolutionist ever said they were, or that ducks are descended from crocodiles or vice versa. Monkeys and frogs share an ancestor, which certainly looked nothing like a frog and nothing like a monkey. Maybe it looked a bit like a salamander, and we do indeed have salamander-like fossils dating from the right time. But that is not the point. Every one of the millions of species of animals shares an ancestor with every other one.

The fact is that Creationists and Intelligent Designers have, in fact, lied to people about what evolution is. They purposely misrepresent it, and explicitly misstate what it says, so that it appears foolish and absurd. And to be honest, if evolutionists were teaching that a monkey once suddenly gave birth to a human, I’d agree that would be wrong. But evolutionists don’t actually teach that, because that’s not what evolution says.

It’s time for religionists to grow the hell up, stop lying about things, and just accept that their metaphysics has been scientifically disproven. Their beliefs about creation do not entitle them to lie about evolution or about science in general.

One last note: Is there any particular reason the editors at Newsweek decided to denigrate Dawkins by labeling him as “angry” in their headline? Just wondering out loud.